Dr
Colm
Durkan is the founder and head of the Scanning Probe
Microscopy and Nanoelectronics group
at the Nanoscience centre of the University of
Cambridge. He is a fellow of Girton College,
Cambridge.
Originally from Dublin, he obtained his primary degree
in Physics from
Trinity College Dublin, with first class
honours. He was also a
Trinity College Foundation scholar, and was the
receipient of the
Fitzgerald medal in 1992. He obtained his PhD in
Physics, also
from Trinity College, on the topic of Scanning
near-field optical
microscopy (SNOM), and built the first SNOM in the
country. After
spending a postdoctoral stint at Konstanz University
in Germany, during
which time he was awarded an Alexandar von Humboldt
visiting fellow's
scholarship, he came to work in Cambridge in August
1997 as a postdoc
in Mark Welland's group. He has been a
University lecturer with
full tenure since July 2000 and a Reader in Nanoscale
Engineering since
October 2010. He is on the editorial board of
the
journals Ultramicroscopy, Microscopy &
Imaging and ISRN Nanotechnology. As well as over
60 papers in peer-reviewed Journals, Colm has also
written a textbook on nanoscale electronics, the
second edition of which is being written at the
moment. Details of
teaching can be found at the following link: teaching.
Colm's
research
is focused on Functional nanoscale imaging and
manipulation of functional materials at the nanoscale
to better
understand how to create novel devices and structures,
and on sensors
for a wide range of applications.